I don’t mean to brag, but I drove somewhere without my GPS. And arrived where I meant to be. Without getting lost once. Seriously.

This would be ho-hum news a few decades ago. Then technology began erasing our memories.

Not erasing, exactly. More like replacing.

When I was a teen, I carried a Rolodex of telephone numbers in my head. Then I gained a smartphone and lost my smarts.

Since the phone remembers all the phone numbers I need, I can’t recall more than a couple of digits on my own.

The GPS did in our brains a similar disservice.

In the old days, if I didn’t already know my way, I opened a roadmap and memorized the route. Done. Then I drove to the place like a homing pigeon. Because I could remember things.

Back then, we all navigated by roadmaps. The maps started out as flatly folded wonders of cartography, but ended up as crumpled balls crinkled paper mashed inside gloveboxes.

I used to keep quite the collection of roadmaps in the glovebox, one for every state on the East Coast, and an even bigger one of the whole East Coast.

Unfold one of those babies, and you could easily see where you were and where you were going on the map.

You just couldn’t see where you were and where you were going on the road itself because the map covered the entirety of the windshield.

Now where was I? Oh, yeah, technology, bad memory.

The directional challenge began at the end of a visit to Cincinnati. My next port of call was Kentucky. No problem. I reached for my phone to set the GPS, which is when I discovered that the battery had run dry. Kaput. That phone was dead.

I plugged the phone into the car charger, which is, as my dad used to say, slower than molasses in January.

I wasn’t going to wait around. I’m a guy. I can figure it out. Besides, 50 years ago, I always knew where I was going.

I checked the glovebox. No maps. I’d become too used to the GPS.

There were no gloves in the glovebox, either. Has anyone ever kept gloves in a glovebox? Probably not. Our wadded-up road maps took up all the room.

I’d just stop somewhere to ask for directions. Ha! I’m kidding again, of course. What guy would ask for directions?

I could navigate south by the stars. It was 3 p.m. No stars.

Oh, well, I didn’t have a sextant in the glovebox either. Nor do I have no clue how to read one.

But unless somebody moved things around on me again, Kentucky is due south of Cincinnati. So… if the sun rises in the east, and it’s 3 p.m., and Jane leaves Los Angeles in a train traveling east at 30 mph, and Manuel’s train leaving west from Chicago at 60 mph…

I never could find a proper use for story problems in fourth grade math class. The plots were always so thin. There were no superheroes in the stories, no spies, no explosions. How can a story be a problem without spies, superheroes or explosions?

Besides, I need to get to Kentucky. Trains in Los Angeles and Chicago at 3 p.m. are not much help with that.

No, what I had to do was exactly what my dad taught me all those years ago: Just drive around for a while. It has to be here somewhere.

Sure enough, it was. I wasn’t too worried. By the time I found it, my phone held a bit of a charge. Then I could forget about remembering.

Send maps to Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. He’ll read them as soon as he remembers how to open the messages.